Power-Efficiency Comparison of Spectrum-Efficient Optical Networks

With steady traffic volume growth in the core networks, it is predicted that the future optical network communication will be constrained mainly by the power consumption. Hence, for future internet sustainability, it will be a mandate to ensure power-efficiency in the optical networks. Two paradigms known to support both, the traffic heterogeneity and high bandwidth requests are the: (i) next generation flexible (or elastic) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) based networks which provide flexible bandwidth allocation per wavelength, and (ii) currently deployed mixed-line-rate (MLR) based networks which provision the co-existence of 10/40/100 Gbps on varied wavelengths within the same fiber. In this work, the power-efficiency of an OFDM, and a MLR based network has been compared for which, a mixed integer linear program (MILP) model has been formulated considering deterministic traffic between every network source-destination pair. The simulation results show that in regard to power-efficiency, the OFDM based network outperforms the MLR based network